Plans to “draw down” CO2 from the atmosphere – known as carbon dioxide removal (CDR) – “fall short” of the quantities needed to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, new research warns.
Keeping global temperatures below the limit set in the 2015 Paris Agreement requires rapid cuts in greenhouse emissions.
However, scenarios consistent with the Paris limit also assume heavy reliance on CDR, particularly in the second half of the 21st century.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, quantifies the “CDR gap” – the difference between the amount of CDR included in national climate plans and what would be needed to limit warming to 1.5C.
CDR currently removes about 3bn tonnes of CO2 from the air every year, of which almost 100% comes from land-based methods, such as afforestation and reforestation, the study says.
The authors estimate that if countries implement their national targets, CDR will increase by up to 1.9bn tonnes of CO2 per year by 2050.
However, assessing a range of scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5C, the authors find a “CDR gap” in 2050 of 0.4bn-5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year.
One scientist, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that framing the lack of additional plans for CDR as a “gap” is an “interesting idea”. However, he says it may not reflect a “definitive need for action” because the future role of CDR is debated.
Some scientists argue that reliance on CDR should be avoided, because land-based CDR can cause significant ecological and societal risks. Others worry that the promise of being able to use CDR in the future might dilute incentives to cut fossil-fuel use today.
The lead author of the study tells Carbon Brief that he recognises these concerns and made an effort to discuss them in the paper.
However, he says that calculating the CDR gap is important for assessing nations’ progress – and will provide a way of knowing whether countries are under- or over-committing to CDR in the future.
CO2 removal
CO2 removal (CDR) refers to methods that draw down CO2 from the air and store it indefinitely on land, in the ocean, in geological formations or in products.
The study authors note that the term CDR “includes human enhancement of natural removal processes, but excludes natural uptake not caused directly by human activities”. The latter includes the huge amounts of CO2 absorbed by the land and oceans each year.
The paper groups CDR into two categories:
- Conventional CDR on land: This includes afforestation, in which trees are planted when previously there were none, and reforestation, which means restoring areas where the trees have been cut down or degraded.
- Novel CDR: This includes all CDR methods that are not based on forestry and land-use change, such as biochar, direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
Using data collected over 2011-20, the authors estimate that total human emissions of all greenhouse gases have reached 60bn tonnes per year. Of this, CDR efforts currently remove around 3bn every year, they find. The study calculates global emissions in CO2 equivalent (CO2e).
The plot below shows current global greenhouse gas emissions and removals. The bar on the left shows emissions of CO2 (blue) and non-CO2 (pink) gases, as well as land emissions (brown). CO2 removal is shown in yellow.
The bars on the right show that 99.9% of CDR comes from conventional CDR on land (dark yellow), while “novel” CDR (light yellow) has a negligible contribution.
In 2015, countries agreed under the Paris Agreement to keep warming “well below 2C” above pre-industrial temperatures, with an aspiration of limiting warming to 1.5C.
Rapid cuts in emissions are crucial to meet this goal. To make progress, countries are required to submit – and regularly update – their plans for reducing emissions. There is currently a sizeable “emissions gap” between the cuts included in these national proposals and those needed to limit warming to 1.5C.
In many future scenarios that meet the Paris limit, CDR features heavily. For example, in scenarios where global temperatures initially “overshoot” 1.5C, before falling below the limit by 2100, large-scale CDR would be used to remove carbon from the atmosphere and allow global temperatures to decline.
In its most recent assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) modelled 541 pathways that hold warming to 1.5C or 2C. All of these pathways involve CDR implementation between 2020 and 2100, ranging from a total of 450bn to 1.1tn tonnes of CO2, in addition to deep emissions cuts.
However, there are currently no rules requiring governments to clearly report their CDR plans.
To assess the amount of CDR proposed by governments, the authors therefore had to analyse a range of documents submitted to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), such as countries’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and their long-term low-emissions development strategies.
The authors find that if countries implement their national targets, CDR could expand by 1.5-1.9bn tonnes of CO2 per year, compared to levels in 2020. The paper notes that many countries plan to expand land-based removals, but none has yet committed to “substantively scaling” novel CDR methods.
Warming threshold
To assess how much CDR is needed to meet the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement, the authors use Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). These models look at the energy technologies, energy use choices, land-use changes and societal trends that cause, or prevent, greenhouse gas emissions.
The authors select a range of IAM scenarios from the latest IPCC scenario database for its sixth assessment report (AR6). Scenarios that limit warming to 2C require emissions to fall by 46-75% between 2020 and 2050, but CDR becomes the “main mitigation strategy” in the second half of the century, the study says.
The authors add that in these scenarios, conventional CDR on land “starts from a high baseline, but quickly reaches saturation by the mid-century due to land area constraints for afforestation/restoration”. Meanwhile, novel CDR scales up throughout the 21st century and accounts for more than half of cumulative emissions by the year 2100.
To assess the pathways in more detail, the authors select three scenarios that limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels
In the “demand reduction” scenario, humanity focuses on efficiency and sufficiency measures. This scenario requires an increase in land-based CDR, but no increase in “novel” CDR methods.
The “renewables” scenario sees a supply-side transformation towards renewable energy. This scenario mainly requires land-based CDR, but also includes a small contribution from novel methods.
The “carbon removal” scenario involves a rapid near-term reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, but fossil fuels are never entirely phased out, leading to higher “residual emissions” at net-zero CO2. Near-equal levels of land-based and novel CDR are needed by 2050, meaning that novel CDR needs to scale up more than a thousand times from its current capacity.
The plot below shows annual CDR under these three scenarios. The blue line indicates current CDR and each yellow line shows a different scenario. A lower (more negative) number means more CDR.
The study shows that current government plans – which would result in an extra 1.5-1.9bn tonnes of CDR per year by 2050 – are not ambitious enough to comply with any of the three 1.5C scenarios.
The table below shows the changes in different types of CDR required under the different scenarios by 2050, compared to 2020 levels. The column on the right shows the “CDR gap” between current plans and each scenario in 2050.
| Scenario | Total additional CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | Additional land-based CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | Additional novel CDR (bn tonnes CO2/year) | CDR gap (bn tonnes CO2/year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Demand reduction | 2.3 | 2.3 | 0 | 0.4 |
| Renewables | 5.1 | 4.1 | 0.91 | 3.2 |
| Carbon removal | 7.4 | 4.0 | 3.5 | 5.5 |
The analysis shows that countries “lack progress in this domain of mitigation”, the study says. However, the size of the shortfall depends heavily on the scenario.
Under the demand reduction scenario, the CDR gap in 2050 is only 0.4bn tonnes of CDR per year, but this grows more than tenfold to 5.5bn tonnes of CDR per year under the carbon removal scenario.
Mind the gap
The prospect of relying on large-scale CDR to meet global climate goals is one that prompts concern in many experts.
One fear is that the promise of being able to use CDR in the future might dilute incentives to cut fossil fuel use today, a phenomenon known as “mitigation deterrence”.
Dr William Lamb – a researcher at the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and lead author on the study – tells Carbon Brief that the paper acknowledges this concern and tries to be clear that CDR is not a replacement for mitigation.
Prof Steve Pye is a professor at University College London’s Energy Institute, who was not involved in the study. He says that framing the lack of CDR as a “gap” is an “interesting idea”, but does not necessarily reflect a “definitive need for action” in the same way as the emissions gap:
“The implications of the CDR gap are much more open to debate as CDR is a category of mitigation action, with the size of the gap either a cause for alarm or not depending on one’s view of what role that option will or should play.”
He adds that the analysis could even be “interpreted as positive”, because it shows that countries are not being distracted by novel CDR.
Alexandra Deprez – a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, who is not involved in the study – tells Carbon Brief that the new study does not do enough to consider the “sustainability limits” of CDR.
She recently co-wrote a Carbon Brief guest post explaining these limits, which said:
“The large-scale deployment of land-based CDR could come with major challenges. These include significant ecological and societal risks – particularly to biodiversity loss, food security, freshwater use and human rights, among others – which have not been comprehensively assessed.”
Deprez and Lamb have “opposite starting points” in their work on CDR and therefore arrive at different conclusions, she explains.
Lamb starts by asking “how much CDR is needed” and concludes that it needs to be scaled up, she says. Meanwhile, she tells Carbon Brief that her own work starts by asking “how much CDR can be sustainably deployed” and finds that “‘Paris compatible’ scenarios overstep high CDR sustainability risk”.
Lamb says the authors were “very careful” in selecting the three focus scenarios for the study. He adds:
“We have a kind of selection criteria that includes thinking about the sustainability constraints, whether they’re using too much biomass, whether they’re scaling up novel methods too quickly. And so we’re quite conservative about the specific scenarios we choose.”
Meanwhile Prof Joeri Roglej – director of research at the Grantham Institute – tells Carbon Brief that the study “puts pathways that aim to keep warming as close to 1.5C as possible in the same basket as pathways that keep it below 2C only, therewith suggesting a lower overall ambition than the Paris Agreement”.
He adds:
“The study doesn’t distinguish scenarios with CDR levels that risk undermining sustainability. These presentation choices therefore perpetuate some of the reasons why CDR research is often criticised, including that CDR scholarship often turns a blind eye to the sustainability risks of large-scale CDR deployment.”
Pye adds a note of caution about using IAMs, saying they have “relied heavily on CDR to meet high ambition targets” without accounting for the “political reality” faced by many governments.
CDR reporting
According to the study, only about 40 countries, including the EU, have outlined scenarios in their long-term strategies that depict quantifiable levels of CDR by 2050.
For the other countries – which account for 62% of current conventional CDR on land – the authors assume that overall CDR levels will remain constant.
Lamb tells Carbon Brief that this is a “big assumption”. He notes that while CDR globally has been “quite stable over the past 20 years”, there is a lot of variation between countries. For example, he says that China has been “rapidly increasing” its CDR through large afforestation projects, while many countries in Europe have seen a decrease due to problems in their forestry sector.
The study also assumes that countries without quantifiable scenarios do not currently plan to implement novel CDR methods. “This includes China, Norway and Saudi Arabia, which are all developing technology roadmaps towards novel CDR and could contribute to closing the gap,” the paper says.
Dr Ajay Gambhir is a visiting senior research fellow at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment, and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that many land-based carbon sinks, such as forests, have the potential to transition to sources of carbon over the coming years.
He adds:
“The authors are mindful of potential reversibility of forest carbon, but this highlights the risks that we are even further from our CDR, and emissions reduction, needs than might be indicated in this analysis.”
The lack of clear data shows that “we need more clarity” in CDR reporting, Lamb tells Carbon Brief. He argues that increasing transparency would “allow more critical reflection actually on carbon dioxide removal plans and whether they’re ambitious enough – or even too ambitious at the expense of emissions reductions”.
The analysis from this paper will be included in the next State of CDR report, which will be released this summer.
The post CO2 removal ‘gap’ shows countries ‘lack progress’ for 1.5C warming limit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
CO2 removal ‘gap’ shows countries ‘lack progress’ for 1.5C warming limit
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.